Daniel’s Blog

Well, well, well… you may have noticed that I haven’t made a blog post since the one about the diary.

Well, I’ve just started the Masters (MSc in Machine Learning and Data Mining) at the University of Bristol. I had an intro week last week, and started attending lectures and other events yesterday.

I am really really enjoying it, the only one thing that I am a bit worried about is that it’s going to be taking up a lot more time than I realised. Which may affect me earning some money, unless I work on things which are similar enough to the stuff that I am working on at University. We shall see, it is only the first week, and things shall probably calm down a little.

I am particularly enjoying the biological aspect of the course (e.g. Genetic Algorithms/Programming and Computational Genomics and Bioinformatics), and I’m looking forward to touching the psychological aspects also.

This is actually going to sound quite weird coming from someone who titles himself “Technology Evangelist”, but I really don’t like using technology… computers (hardware and software) are so awkward to use, mobile phones never have enough signal and it’s all so reliant on electricity. The one thing that I truly feel about the whole subject of Machine Learning and Data Mining is that it is supposed to make things easier! In order for technology to become really useful we have to look towards some things that we have outside of technology:

• High/Deep Semantics and Art
• Biology, Psychology and other Sciences
• Ubiquity/Omnipresence
• Humanities and Society

Maybe the seven liberal arts can also help out:

1. Grammar
2. Rhetoric
3. Logic
4. Geometry
5. Arithmetic
6. Music
7. Astronomy

I do not believe that we can continue with technology in it’s current state. As for the Semantic Web, I do believe it is a step in the right direction, but it is only a small piece of the future puzzle.